The Portuguese era marked the end of medieval Sri Lanka and thebeginning of modern Sri Lanka. It changed the island's orientationaway from India and gave it a unique identity moulded by almost450 years of Western influence due to the presence of three successiveEuropean powers : the Portuguese (1505-1658), the Dutch (1658-1796) andthe British (1796-1948). The Portuguese cultural imprint can be analyzed byexamining : (a) those who claim Portuguese descent (the PortugueseBurghers), (b) those who do not claim Portuguese descent but who follow theRoman Catholic faith, (c) those who are neither of Portuguese descent norfollow the Catholic faith but nevertheless underwent a sociocultural transformation.Language is a necessary element in the set of culture. The otherelements are subjective and could include religion, food, dress, music anddance.

The interaction of the Portuguese and the Sri Lankans led to theevolution of a new language, Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole, which flourishedas a lingua franca in the island for over three and a half centuries (16th to mid-19th). Pidgins and Creoles are contact languages ; they evolve when peoplewho do not speak each other's mother-tongue come into contact. Pidginsonly survive as long as the interlingual contact lasts and are generallyshortlived. The etymon of Pidgin is business. A Creole is a Pidgin which hasbecome the mother-tongue of a speech community. Sri Lanka PortugueseCreole, a subset of Indo-Portuguese (the Portuguese Creole that flourishedin coastal India), has been the solution to the inter-communication problemsthat arose when the Portuguese and Sri Lankans came into contact. In SriLanka, miscegenation reinforced the Creole as the mestiços (offspring of aPortuguese father and a Sri Lankan mother) were bilingual – they wereproficient in the Creole and Sinhala or Tamil. Boxer (1961 : 61) commentsthat the Eurasians (mestiços), or even slave women, kept alive the use of thePortuguese language in places like Batavia, Malacca and Ceylon (Sri Lanka),which were under Dutch control.

In contemporary Sri Lanka, the Creole is limited to the spoken form. Themajor groups of speakers are the Burghers (people of Portuguese and Dutchdescent) in the Eastern province (Batticaloa and Trincomalee) and the Kaffirs(people of African origin) in the North-Western province (Puttalam) (seemap for geographic locations). The Creole speakers do not belong to thehigher echelons of Sri Lankan society and have been marginalized due to thesociopolitical changes that occurred since the Portuguese era ended.During the Portuguese era, the mestiços or topazes (etymon Sanskritdvibash, « one who speaks two languages ») were in demand because theyserved as interpreters. When the Dutch took over the coastal areas andmaltreated the Catholics, the Portuguese descendants took refuge in thecentral hills of the Kandyan kingdom under Sinhalese rule. Tennent (1850 :72) observes that the Portuguese Burghers had been suppressed by the Dutchpenal laws and that even under the more liberal British regime they had notaspired to rise above the status that their forefathers had been reduced to.Despite their disadvantaged socioeconomic position, the Burghers havemaintained their Portuguese cultural identity. In Batticaloa the CatholicBurgher Union has played a pivotal role in reinforcing this. The Union ishowever struggling to finance the in-house English newsletter with Portugueseextracts.

As the Creole was losing ground in the island, many Burghers substitutedone prestige language (Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole) for another (English).Most of the affluent Burghers, whose mother-tongue became English, haveemigrated to economically strong English-speaking countries, mainly toCanada and Australia. The World Bank classifies Sri Lanka as a low incomecountry1. Emigration was inevitable, given the fluency in English of theaffluent Burghers.

The Dutch Burghers and Portuguese Burghers contracted intermarriages.Today, many Burghers in Batticaloa have Dutch names, but are RomanCatholics and follow Portuguese cultural traditions. Even though the Dutchwere more powerful from the outset, they were not able to entrench theircultural traditions in Sri Lanka. Dutch was used for administrative purposesduring the Dutch era, but attempts to spread the language proved futile.Instead the Dutch had to learn the Portuguese Creole for home conversationdue to their Creole-speaking wives and nannies.

The Kaffirs, on the other hand, were brought to Sri Lanka by the Portuguese,Dutch and British, as a part of the naval force and for domestic work.Whatever their African origins, the Kaffirs were exposed to and haveassumed Portuguese culture. Not surprisingly, there was intermarriagebetween the Portuguese Burghers and Kaffirs who belonged to the sameculture set ; they spoke Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole and were RomanCatholics. The Kaffirs are mainly chena cultivators but a few have foundemployment in the Puttalam Salt Pans, the Puttalam hospital and in localgovernment offices as peons and labourers. Although they have withstoodcultural pressures from the other ethnic groups for a long period, they arenow blending into multiethnic Sri Lanka due to cross-cultural marriages.The Creole is fast losing ground as a spoken language but the communityretain their Portuguese linguistic legacy by singing Portuguese Creole songson social occasions (Jayasuriya 1995, 1996, 1997). Some Kaffirs are emigratingfor economic reasons, a phenomenon common to all ethnic groups. The18,5 million population of multiethnic Sri Lanka consists of 73,95 % Sinhalese, 12,7 % Sri Lankan Tamils, 7,05 % Moors2, 5,52 % Indian Tamils,0,32 % Malays, 0,26 % Europeans, Eurasians and Burghers, 0,20 % Others(Chinese, Kaffirs, Veddhas, Indian Moors, Europeans).